How ‘Search’ has become the Watchword of the Digital Organisation

Hafezieh, Najmeh; Pollock, Neil

doi:10.5465/ambpp.2018.18514abstract

Cited by 1 publication

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“…Another contribution is to the calls to study how to develop skills and knowledge that marketers need in the digital world (Gupta et al, 2020;Rahman et al, 2021;Wedel and Kannan, 2016). Our study showed that digital marketers are required to have hybrid expertise specialising in both marketing and technical areas such as data science or to become T-shaped (Conley et al, 2017;Hafezieh and Pollock, 2018). This is because working in digitalised world requires knowledge in different areas to be able to work independently that facilitate the rapid iterations of experimenting.…”

Section: Conclusion 61 Theoretical Contributionsmentioning

confidence: 92%

“…This means for marketing professionals, for example, that they need to have some technical knowledge of working with data, data analytics and using relevant tools. Although this knowledge would not be to the level of data scientists or IT professionals who will still be responsible for providing and maintaining the IT infrastructure, developing technical skills in marketing forms cross-functional collaborations which are becoming more essential in market-led or consumer centric firms (Hafezieh and Pollock, 2018;Kalaignanam et al, 2021).…”

Section: Theoretical Backgroundmentioning

confidence: 99%

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“Hacking marketing”: how do firms develop marketers' expertise and practices in a digital era?

Hafezieh¹,

Pollock²,

Ryan³

2023

JEIM

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PurposeDigital technologies, digitalised consumers and the torrent of customer data have been transforming marketing practice. In discussing such trends, existing research has either focussed on the skills marketers need or broad-based approaches such as agile methods but has given less consideration to just how such skills or approaches might be developed and used in marketers' day-to-day activities and in the organisation of marketing in the firm. This is what the authors address in this paper.Design/methodology/approachThis paper adopts an in-depth case study approach to examine an exemplary digital enterprise in transformation of their digital marketing. The insights were gathered from 25 interviews, netnography and document analysis of the case organisation in addition to 10 interviews with independent experts.FindingsDrawing on practice-oriented approach, the authors show how organisations respond to the emerging trends of digital consumers and big data by taking a ‘hacking marketing’ approach and developing novel marketing expertise at disciplinary boundaries. The authors put forward three sets of practices that enable and shape the hacking marketing approach. These include spanning the expertise boundary, making value measurable and experimenting through which their adaptive, iterative and multidisciplinary work occurs. This explains how managing digital consumers and big data is not within the realm of information technology (IT) functions but marketing and how marketing professionals are changing their practice and moving their disciplinary boundaries.Practical implicationsThis study offers practical contributions for firms in terms of identifying new work practices and expertise that marketing specialists need in managing digital platforms, digitalised consumers and big data. This study’s results show that enterprises need to design and implement strong training programmes to prepare their marketing workforce in adopting experimentations of agile approach and data-driven decision making. In addition, Marketing education should be changed so that programmes consider a review of their courses and include the novel marketing models and approaches into their curriculum.Originality/valueThis study contributes to the nascent discussions by unpacking how enterprises can develop new marketing expertise and practices beyond skillsets and how such practices form new hacking marketing approach which addresses the problem of the inability of the conventional marketing approach to show its value within the firm.

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